The provision of high-speed data services to mobile stations such as mobile telephones and communicators in TDMA networks has resulted in the need for mobile stations to transmit in more than one slot in each TDMA frame. A difficulty with this is that the base station needs to know the maximum power capability of the mobile station.
It has been proposed to allow a mobile station to change its power class through a is classmark change procedure or a routing area update but these procedures are found to be too slow and also not properly supported by several network implementations.